Spring�s ROI

[Kunal Goel]

Spring is very new to the market and provides a new lease of life to framework development. The influence of Spring on the latest EJB specification is undeniable.
Well, a lot has been spoken and written about the Spring application framework.
Nobody can deny that Spring directly aims at Application Servers like IBM�s Websphere and BEA�s Weblogic. But, has anybody done a serious study of comparing the performance of Spring�s lightweight containers and these app servers.

So, are there any benchmark results available yet.

Rgds,
Kunal
SCJP

[Karthik Guru]

can refer to this discussion

[Kunal Goel]

Hi Karthik,
Well, the thread really doesn't answer my question. What I was expecting was something very concrete, maybe in terms of figures and bar graphs (comparing Spring with Weblogic or Websphere for that matter).

Rgds,
Kunal

[Karthik Guru]

Hi Kunal,

Originally posted by Kunal Jaggi:
(comparing Spring with Weblogic or Websphere for that matter).

Spring is not a j2ee container. It does not implement the j2ee spec. The link that i provided explains the same thing. So IMHO Spring Vs Weblogic/Websphere is not an apples-apples comparison. Spring integrates well with any of these containers. It does employ jdk dynamic proxies that allows you to apply middleware services declaratively to pojos (unlike j2ee containers that treat ejbs in a special way) if you want to. So proxy performance could be an issue but i guess even that s'd fade in comparison to the time taken to execute actual business logic. The proxy factory settings can be changed to make sure that spring uses cglib instead of jdk dynamic proxies for performance critical proxies. Even here, it might delegate the actual middleware logic to a container implementation. So as you mentioned in your first post, it is indeed light weight.
[ November 09, 2005: Message edited by: Karthik Guru ]

[Richa Anand]

I found this to be an interesting discussion.

Well, I believe that Spring proposes a paradigm wherein we use POJOs instead of EJBs. That is, what we used to previously do through EJBs, we would be doing away with POJOs. It has been seen that many projects which don�t require remote/distributed computing, still make heavy use of EJBs, which is bad. So, directly, Spring targets the EJB technology. And, since we don�t need EJBs, we don�t also need an app server right?
So why can�t we compare Spring (okay I agree Spring is not a containet but an app framework) with a high end app server like Weblogic/Websphere?

Regards,
Richa Anand

[Karthik Guru]

Originally posted by Richa Anand:
(okay I agree Spring is not a containet but an app framework)

Spot on!

I think this question has come up before during various spring book promotions. IMHO, You can use Spring POJO with declarative transaction / security capablities instead of a SLSB. But who implements the nitty gritties of transaction management internally?..definitely not Spring. ejb2 entity beans are outdated. So lets see what Spring has to provide in this area?..None. Sure you can use some popular ORM framework instead. But then its not about *just* Spring anymore. JMS/MDBs are good. Does Spring have a MDB equivalent?.We all develop web applications and they can be hosted on an app server. Does spring provide a web / servlet container?..No. This tells me that Spring cannot exist on its own. It has to collaborate with something else. An app server does'nt have to. It can do everything for you stand alone because it *implements* the middleware services and Spring does'nt.

(Weblogic) Vs (Tomcat + Spring + hibernate + ACEGI + Some JMS implementation) makes sense. But 'weblogic vs spring' does'nt sound too convincing.

[Pradeep bhatt]

Comparing Spring MVC with Struts would be perfect I guess.